


And the Abyss Looked Back

by bluestar



Series: Oneshots and Stand-alones [6]
Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: Gen, bad-end AUs aren't usually my thing but I've had this idea for ages, oh god I'm SO SORRY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:35:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2011125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestar/pseuds/bluestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memories can be poisonous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the Abyss Looked Back

He shouldn't have looked.

Raleigh knew he shouldn't have looked. The distorted universe had  _hurt_  to look at; like trying to focus on a shattered reflection that twisted and turned every time his gaze shifted. It had been such a brief look too. But he could feel the memories burning in his brain - red skies, a dying sun, arching towers of chitin and metal and the  _things_  crawling on them. He remembered and wished he didn't. He wanted to shake them out of his skull but no, no, there they all were rooted deep inside and poisoning his dreams every time he got more than a few minutes of sleep.

Mako knew something was wrong. She had tried to talk to him at first. The first days after the Breach was closed, when he had started to withdraw into himself. Nursing memories of something he didn't want in his head. He had talked back at first too, but then the effort was too much, the words empty and droning, conversations turning in evasive circles. He hated to worry her. He didn't want to talk to her. He had lost his voice and it hurt more than anything to realize the other half of him was cordoned off by a scar he could not stop picking at.

He couldn't sleep.

The Shatterdome corridors were empty and still at night. Raleigh paced them until the small hours of the morning every time the memories woke him; he couldn't remember the last time he'd stayed in bed through the night. He was wandering now, hands in his pockets, slouching and head crooked down. He walked without looking where he was going, eyes skipping over cracks in the cement. The dream lingered in the corners of his brain like a sickness; a sky in scarlet and orange, stars like embers smoldering in it...a sun collapsing in on itself, eating itself. The world twisted and shimmered as though Raleigh had been staring at it from underwater. Trying to focus, trying to see. Frustrated and angry when the distortions hurt him, leaving him half blind and all the more desperate to look.

“-I will not. You shouldn’t be suggesting it.”

“Not suggesting. Just wanna…”

“Just nothing. Let it go.”

Raleigh looked up; he’d wandered through the halls and ended up near the lab. It was nearly two in the morning and yet Newt and Gottlieb were awake, talking in low voices that creaked with strain. Raleigh crept towards the open door and listened closely, arms hugged around himself.

“Let it go. Not that easy, Hermann. You-”

“Shut up. Let me work.”

“You’re not working. You’ve been standing there all night.”

Raleigh peered inside carefully, trying to be inconspicuous as he eavesdropped. Gottlieb was standing in front of his chalkboards but they were empty of writing. He seemed lost, merely standing there as though waiting for something. Newt was sitting at his desk with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms hugged around his knees and curled up in his chair.

“I’m just waiting,” Gottlieb said. “It’ll come to me.”

“What will?”

“Don’t know.”

“How can you wait for something you don’t know?”

Gottlieb looked over his shoulder at Newt, eyes narrowed slightly. Their expressions mirrored each other perfectly; masklike, as though they weren’t quite living in their own skins so comfortably anymore. Newt tilted his head to one side and Gottlieb mimicked him in tandem.

“I’ll know it,” he said. “When it comes to me.”

“You wait and wait but there’s nothing where it’s supposed to be,” Newt said. Raleigh frowned, puzzled; their voices were inflectionless, but he could hear Gottlieb’s accent in Newt’s voice and vice versa.

“Whose fault is that?” Gottlieb asked.

“Mine,” Newt said. “Ours.”

“Or theirs,” Gottlieb countered. Newt tilted his head to the other side.

“No use blaming them. We took care of that.”

“We did. But someone ought to carry some of the fault.”

“ _Someone_ ought to.”

They fell silent, looking away from each other. Raleigh hesitated a moment and then knocked, rapping his knuckles against the rust-spotted metal door. Newt and Gottlieb looked to him as he came in.

“Hello, Raleigh.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Raleigh wasn’t sure who had said what first. They sounded alike.

“Been having trouble with it,” he said. “Just figured I’d walk a bit. Blow off some steam.”

“You’re free to spend time here if you like,” Gottlieb said – or maybe it was Newt. Raleigh had been looking at the specimen tank with a burnt and dead brain sample when they’d spoken, attention wandering. He edged towards it and traced his hand along the cold glass, his reflection distorted.

_red skies sun eating itself it burns and burns there’s no looking away from it should have looked away should have should have_

_reflections like rings in water like cracks in a mirror hurts to see hurts to look_

“You’re looking rather pale.”

“I haven’t been feeling well,” Raleigh said. He looked around slowly; Newt and Gottlieb were still watching him, their expressions vague. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

“Then you’re in like company.”

“Maybe,” Raleigh muttered. He looked at the specimen tank again. “I dream.”

“And they burn.”

“Burn and seethe.”

“Can’t sleep.”

“Can’t wake.”

“Trapped,” Raleigh said.

“The Anteverse is an ugly place.”

“But the stars,” Raleigh protested. His voice cracked on the words. “I can’t…it’s like a song stuck in my head. I hate it.”

“But you want to see it.”

Gottlieb limped over and stood beside Raleigh, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“And the want’s like a bug in your head, isn’t it?” he asked. “Digging around. It doesn’t belong but you can’t root it out, so the damn thing makes itself at home.”

“So you pretend you are perfectly fine and that there are no repercussions to your actions,” Newt said, standing on Raleigh’s opposite side and staring at the tank. “You realize that you acted on necessity and that there was no other way.”

“But it’s like a scar,” Raleigh said. “And it hurts.”

Newt and Gottlieb both nodded, trading looks over Raleigh’s bowed head.

“Does Mako know?”

“Does she understand?”

“She knows something’s wrong.”

“You should talk to her.”

“Before you forget how.”

“Before your mind starts coming loose at the corners.”

“Is that what’s happening to me?”

Raleigh looked from Gottlieb to Newt, unsure which was which. They looked down at the floor and sighed.

“Stick your hand in boiling water,” one said.

“Don’t be surprised when you’re scalded,” the other finished.

Raleigh swallowed hard, his mouth gone dry.

“I only looked for a minute,” he said. Newt and Gottlieb both nodded.

“And therein lies the problem.”

Raleigh stepped back and looked away.

“I don’t want this. I want it gone.”

“War leaves scars, Mister Becket.”

“Some run deeper than others.”

“Some never close.”

They watched him in something close to sympathy.

“We took a look in one place we shouldn’t have. You, another.”

“So if you’re going to quietly fall apart haunted by something-”

“-at least you’re in like company.”

Raleigh’s knees weakened and he tottered back another step. Newt grabbed his chair rolled it quickly towards him, catching him before he could stumble. Raleigh sank into it and hunched over, arms circling around himself again. He studied the metal floor, feeling blank and tired inside. His mind turned involuntarily back to the memories of the Anteverse and he let it wash over him, trying to remember the way the dying sun had burned. It had been like a living thing twisting and turning in on itself.

“Why is this happening?” he asked, pushing the memory away. “I don’t understand.”

Gottlieb leaned against the specimen tank, looking up at the ceiling idly.

“Human perceptions are tuned to one reality,” he said. “Shake things up too much and it all goes to hell.”

“But all I did was look out the window,” Raleigh said. “Me and Mako both.”

He went cold, eyes wide as he stared at Gottlieb.

“Is she…?”

“She was rendered unconscious,” Newt said. He picked up a plastic Godzilla figure off his desk, turning it over in his hands thoughtfully. “Limiting the exposure.”

Raleigh’s head hung and he gave a sigh of profound relief. He passed his hands over his face and through his hair, and in the dark behind his closed eyes he saw a sky pocked with fiercely burning stars.

“There’s no fixing this, is there.”

“No.”

“Maybe.”

“We don’t know.”

“Glad that covers all the bases,” Raleigh said dryly. They both gave a short bark of laughter in answer.

“There’s worse things, isn’t there?”

“I’m losing myself by inches. That’s what you pretty much told me. How can it be worse?”

They paused for a moment. Raleigh looked up, drawing back slightly to find them both standing in front of him.

“The Marshall’s informed us we’re to be reassigned within the week,” Gottlieb said.

“Going somewhere secluded,” Newt added. “For our health.”

“Maybe you ought to come along too.”

“But…”

They watched him expectantly, heads tilted to one side in a rather reptilian gesture. Raleigh swallowed hard and found he couldn’t look at them, gaze dropping to the floor.

“Is it because of what you did with the Drift? Are you guys…”

“Changed,” one supplied.

“For better or worse,” the other concluded.

“But there _are_ worse things.”

“I’m going crazy, aren’t I,” Raleigh said, voice thin.

“Maybe.”

“It might have been in your best interest not to have kept your eyes open.”

Raleigh laughed humorlessly.

“So how is it that there’s something worse? You didn’t answer me.”

Newt and Gottlieb traded looks again, sharing a shrug.

“Can't really name a specific. But at least you’re alive.”

“Not much of a consolation if this is how I get to spend the rest of my life.”

“No changing us back from what we are,” Newt murmured. “You were burned a different way. Come along with us when we go. Get yourself back on track.”

“Or let go completely and never come back at all,” Raleigh said. Newt considered, then nodded.

“A possibility.”

Raleigh hid his face in his hands, not moving as Gottlieb awkwardly patted his shoulder, trying to be comforting.

“It’s never going to go away, is it. This is what I get…this is what happens for doing what I did.”

“Necessary actions.”

“Yeah,” Raleigh said vaguely. In the back of his mind, memories of the Anteverse crawled and seethed, a slow burn of unnatural perception undoing his sanity by inches. He could have laughed. He wanted to cry. He did neither, simply looking up at Newt and Gottlieb. They were one and the same now, a single mixed-up mind skipping back and forth between two hosts. Kaiju operated in a hivemind; humans it seemed could as well, though not as smoothly. Their eyes were shadowed and blank as they watched him, faces inexpressive as he gave a thin smile.

“I guess I could tag along when you go. I’ve earned a vacation,” he said. “For my health.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't do bad-end AUs. I don't like them. So this...I have no excuse for this. The idea just kind of spawned out of nowhere and wouldn't leave me be.
> 
>  
> 
> _I'm really sorry about this._


End file.
